Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker

[loreta]

This book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century looks very, very interesting, in the same philosophy and vue of Sott.net. I checked if someone talked about it but I did not see anything. I saw this book today in my library, a new release in Spanish. I took it, I started to read the introduction: the author tells that there is a relation between climate and revolution, famines, peste, etc. He studied this for the XVII century in all the world. Because I did not read the book yet I can not talk about it but this is a review from Amazon.uk:

Review
'Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2013. 'In his monumental new book Parker's approach is systematic and painstaking... giving us a rich and emotionally intense sense of how it felt to live through chaotic times.' (Lisa Jardine, Financial Times) 'What relationship does a changing climate bear to global stability? There could scarcely be a more timely question to ask. Parker deploys a dazzling breadth of scholarship in answering it." (Dan Jones, The Times) 'Global Crisis is the production of a scholar who has reflected on what he knows long enough to take on the double task of synthesis and breakthrough... Parker regales the reader with some wild and grim tales, interleaved with thoughtful reflections from those who lived through the crises.' (Timothy Brook, Literary Review) 'My big book of the year has been Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis on the disastrous war-torn 17th century. It fills in gaps, gives different perspectives - not least on Scotland during the Civil War - and opens new areas of history to explore.' (Catronia Graham, The Guardian) 'In this vast, superbly researched and utterly engrossing book, Parker shows how climate change pushed the world towards chaos... Parker's book is not merely powerful and convincing, it is a monument to scholarly dedication.' (Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times) 'Global Crisis is a magnum opus that will remain a touchstone in three areas for at least a generation: the history of the entire globe, the role of climate in history, and the identification of a major historical crisis in the seventeenth century... Wide-ranging, monumental works of history are rare; this is one of them.' (Theodore K. Rabb, Times Literary Supplement) 'This is indeed a superb and harrowing book, well worth reading for the skill with which Parker summarises the history of pretty well the whole world... a fascinating contribution to history.' (Christopher Booker, The Spectator)' --Financial Times, The Times, Literary Review, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator

This is another review from The Spectator:

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century Geoffrey Parker
Yale, pp.672, £29.99, ISBN: 9780300153231

Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and winters so abnormally hot or cold that their like was ‘never known in the world before’.

These were the days of those London Frost Fairs, when the Thames froze so thickly that it could bear horses, coaches and streets of shops. This was the time of the Maunder Minimum, when for decades after 1645 sunspot activity was almost non-existent. It marked the depths of that ‘Little Ice Age’ which saw global temperatures lower than at any time since the end of the last glaciation 13,000 years ago.

It has long been familiar that the 17th century was also a time of extraordinary political turmoil right across Europe and Asia, from the Thirty Years War which laid waste vast tracts of Germany to the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in China; from the murderous civil wars and revolutions which rocked Britain and France to the disintegration of the Spanish empire. As early as 1643 a Spaniard observed that it was ‘one of the epochs when every nation is turned upside down’. Voltaire noted, a century later, how many rulers had been murdered or executed, from the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim in 1648 and Charles I in 1649 to the Mogul emperor Shah Jehan in 1658, calling it ‘a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to another’. Hugh Trevor-Roper popularised the term used to describe this age of violent transition between ‘the climate of the Renaissance’ and the ‘climate of the Enlightenment’ as ‘the General Crisis’.

What Geoffrey Parker has now added to our perception of that time, however, is the very significant part played in those events, overlooked by Trevor-Roper, by the climate itself. By exploring the impact of those extreme weather events which accompanied the Little Ice Age — and by the remarkable industry of his researches (his bibliography and list of sources run to nearly 150 pages) — he has added a whole new dimension to our understanding of that near-universal ‘time of crisis’.

Who is Geoffrey Parker:

Winner of the 2012 Heineken Prize for History, Geoffrey Parker is a renowned British historian who taught at the University of St Andrews, the University of Illinois, the University of British Columbia and Yale University before becoming Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Spanish-American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cadiz), and the Royal Academy of History (Madrid). His many books include The Grand Strategy of Philip II, published by Yale in 1998 (winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize), and The Military Revolution (1996; winner of the best book prize of the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology), as well as seminal works on global military history and early modern Europe. Global Crisis was awarded a British Academy Medal in 2014.

All the reviews are 5 stars in Amazon.uk

So I think the book can be something to put in a "read-list" and with a fascinating subject like this one for sure it can be very interesting to see ourselves in the past and see our future also. What Sott.net is doing already!